There’s a lot to say for practice, but at some point we have to jump out of the plane or into the deep end.  We cling to the safety blanket of what it is, instead of doing the things that would get us to the place we envision in our minds.  This applies to all areas of life: saying no, learning martial arts, taking downtime, working on our own content, taking a leap from our day job, jumping on the speaking bandwagon, or writing a book.

There is one major goal that applies to small businesses marketing online: make more delighted customers.  Reputation and word of mouth are kings.

If you’re a business owner, you probably have a website and/or are involved in social networking. There are many great ways to learn more about how to improve your efforts and meet your goals.  Often time is spent doing research, attending genius webinars, reading brilliant blogs, watching videos, listening to podcasts, and downloading ebooks.  Of course you want to learn from others who have done a remarkable job.

But now it’s time to get to work with the knowledge that you’ve accumulated.

Here are 6 things you can do right now to make a difference in your marketing efforts online:

1. Tell your story. Why are you so different from every Tom, Dick and Jane, Inc.?  Customers want to know what makes you different, what makes you tick.  If you don’t know the story, how can you market it?  Freshbooks does a brilliant job with sharing their story and they stand out from other invoicing companies as a result.

2. Test. Test everything. Click on things.  I promise that button won’t make things explode.  Maybe.  Test links, test to see how the website looks in different browsers, test the forms, and when you get everything right, dig into A/B testing to see what makes visitors happier.

(Editor disclaimer: if you click the button that does make something explode, I’m in no way responsible for your failure to read.)

3. Make it easy. Every business has a call to action.  You want to sell something, raise money, raise awareness, or share information.  Help me find it when I land on your page.  Help your visitors find it.  Easily.  Big, red (not literally) and loud works.  A site can be pretty and loud at the same time.

4. Think locally. Online marketing is a fabulous thing, but local groups, meetups, networking and other events can help you get to know people around town and boost your business.  Target the local market with Google Places, find a way to share special deals with people in your neighborhood.  Even if your business is virtual, you can still find local customers.

5. Work on your inbound links. The first step in this is creating valuable content that others will want to share with their network. This again goes back to sharing knowledge, but make sure you’re doing it in keyword rich phrases.  Think of it as online word of mouth marketing.

6. Be extraordinary. As Chris Brogan says, if you can’t be extraordinary, be helpful.  Do the unexpected.  Send a customer flowers when their date cancels.  Monitor social channels and reach out if you have knowledge that will help.  Offer them a reward just for being your customer.  When you’re extraordinary, it makes you sticky.  Sticky in a world full of businesses in your niches is good, yes?

It’s now time to stop thinking and start doing.  Stalling runs the risk of the knowledge becoming stale before you have a chance to implement. Learn more and expand your understanding of how to build a better business through online marketing.  Then share it with the rest of us.

What other advice would you give small businesses?

Huge Dropbox fan here, it makes sharing big files super easy which is great, especially for workshifting.  I wanted to share a tip with everyone on how to email files as attachments that you want to share with others via Dropbox.

First, if you don’t have Dropbox, get an account now. (Referral link!)  If you haven’t heard of Dropbox, it allows you to sync your files online and across computers.  It also allows you to share the folders that you create with others, see their changes and offers mobile support for phones and the iPad.  Check it out, you’ll love the ease of file transfers and collaboration opportunities.

Then go over to http://gethabilis.com.  You’ll need to authorize Habilis to connect with your Dropbox account via API, but it only takes a second.

Refresh the http://gethabilis.com page and you’ll see a handy email for adding to your address book.  I added mine to my Google contacts as Dropbox Files.

That’s it! Now you can enjoy sending files to your Dropbox via email if you can’t access the public folder on any device for some reason or another.

Do you know of any other cool Dropbox hacks?  I use it daily and I know others who do as well so share, please!

Some of you know I’m a huge fan of black lab and often my tweet contain their lyrics.  I have a million favorite songs so pointing you at one album would be difficult at best. Buy all of them instead and then watch all the videos.

Their music along with Matthew Ebel’s make up the vast majority of my music collection.

A few months ago, they decided to make a video of their community with photos of the people within it.  They put out a quick call for photos from the community to feature in a video of pictures of people (lyrics are at the bottom of the post).  Of course, I immediately jumped on the bandwagon and sent one over. I never expected to make it in so thanks guys.

Their community is within and watching the video gives a small glimpse of all the people loving their music. It’s very touching.  A simple act and it brought people closer to the music they love.

Pictures Of People from Black Lab on Vimeo.

pictures of people well nothing gets done. and everyone’s tired. yeah but everything’s fine. everything comes in it’s own good time. pictures of people in magazines. I think they’re trying to tell me something. pictures of people I’ve never met living inside my tv set. and my heart gets so full driving around this town. feel like dr. zhivago lost in chicago. these pictures of people never alone or confused just looking for something left at the side of the road. these pictures of people I never talk to. I wanna say ‘I’m pleased to meet you.’ these pictures of people I could believe in if there was a way I could touch and feel them. and I’ll never see the same again. no I’ll never see the same again. and everything gets quiet. I need help to remember. and I feel no regret for the kindness of strangers come down through the airwaves. never alone or afraid just searching for something left at the side of the road. pictures of people. people around me never run out of things to tell me. these pictures of people here in my mind. I carry them with me all of the time. and I’ll never see the same again. what’s left of you my friend. how can I miss you? I’ve never met you. pictures of people.

59 days and counting.

The video below is a TED talk by Rob Hopkins on “Transition to a world without Oil“, who reminds us that the time period in which we’ve developed and build our lives around oil dependency is very short and will very shortly come to an end.  He touches on how oil production has dwindled as well as the energy we get from oil now vs. the 1930s.

“The world isn’t Second Life. We can’t create new land and new energy systems at the click of a mouse.”

Rob founded the Transition movement, helping communities take the steps to creatively come up with new ideas on sustainability now, before our world changes and we must change with it.  Interestingly, one town has created their own currency as a result that is only worth something within the town but inspires local spending and growth.  (As he talks about stories it reminds me muchly of Ron Ploof.)

Will we be able to give up the status and ease of life that we so effectively build on this energy source to embrace a new way of living before we meet a future without oil?  That’s the question that we ultimately need to answer.  This problem isn’t going away.

Think about the ways you can change your world, your community.  It’s a topic on my mind this evening as we ready for Podcamp Boston 5 and this year’s theme Preparing for the Future.

What can you do to creatively change the way you live a little at a time to meet the future transition and prevent disasters like the oil spill from ever occurring again?

When doing business online, one of your first priorities is to make it dead easy to buy.  It is the responsibility of a business to provide a flawless experience online for customers when they get into the sales process.  The goal of every business should be to convert the sale, yes?

As an assistant, I spend a lot of my time managing speaking information, travel schedules and flight/hotel bookings for clients.  For example, booking a hotel should be dead easy.  It takes at most 3-5 minutes (unless they need a convoluted amount of information).

If a site fails me at that moment I click that button to pay, it marks my day.  I now have to call you to book a room and this irritates me because you are wasting my time.  Please don’t.

If you are doing business online, check your processes.  Go through each scenario as if you are a customer and make sure you are providing the best experience possible.  Test the products, forms, buttons, and confirmations.  Then, test it again and then have others test it to get different perspectives.

Make it easy for your customers to get what they want from you. At the end of the day if you make their lives easier you’re more likely to get a repeat customer and recommendations to try your products and services.

We need to get started on Facebook, start tweeting about our business, stick social media icons on our pages, get social and maybe that will save our business.

Recently, I’ve been given the opportunity to learn boxing at the hands of Mark Davis of Boston Martial Arts Center. It’s the last sport I thought I’d jump into, excited to learn, and it’s been helpful in terms of learning about focus and reaction.

There’s obviously a lot of training involved before entering any kind of ring, but one of the things boxing teaches is to look beyond the moment and at what’s going to happen next.

In boxing, you “gather information” by watching your competitors moves. You can “see” when and where the next punch is if you learn to read in between the lines and adjustments of the body. Reading such is referred to in sports terms as telegraphing.

Reading telegraphs in boxing is an art form, a sign of being an expert. Pros spend thousands of hours learning how to read body language and part of the reason they win in the ring is their ability to read those signs and act on them effectively inside a split second.

How can you win at reading telegraphs in marketing to determine competitors next moves?

With the wealth of information being spread about in social media, our thoughts often turn to how we can share content using these tools and to engage with others in our area of expertise as it were.

How many times you heard about or seen a company set up Twitter searches, Tweetdeck listening panes, LinkedIN groups, or Facebook fan pages only to leave them to broken windows?

What’s often left untapped is the ability to use the tools to gather information on what companies, especially competitors, will do next.

However, the real value is going beyond gathering information and analyzing it to figure out the best strategy for a counter against your competition. To provide actionable insights on what’s next for your company.

People sometimes put the filters in place but aren’t sure what to do with the information or are too narrowly focused on their own company’s reputation to look beyond and see what the next moves are being telegraphed from competitors.  Once you learn to read the signs, then you can begin to plot your next moves.

(There are some GREAT paid tools for tracking out there. I won’t mention a wealth of them but I will point you to a blog post on 8 Competitive Intelligence Data Sources by Avinash Kaushik. Also, Chris Penn build a listening dashboard to mimic Bloomberg on iGoogle which is a good example of how you can use iGoogle for absolutely free.  Don’t make the mistake of thinking that once the tools are setup that you’re finished. Someone in your company will need to contribute time daily to sort through the information to find the telegraphs.)

What are you doing to sort through the information that you’re monitoring and how has it helped you make some strategic decisions on what your company’s next best move is?

(A word of caution: All of this assumes that your company has it’s house in order. Goals plotted, departments working together and customers happy. None of this will help if your company is failing at being organized and keeping it’s customers.)

I’m dropping some great links here that I’ve come across this past week.  List is by no means complete but every post on this list is worth your time to check out.  Wait, no, don’t just check out the post…subscribe to these blogs if you aren’t already.  You’ll always be learning something.

Thanks to the great bloggers in this list.

Ron Ploof – C Level Social Media Ignorance

Greg Cangialosi – The Marketers “New Normal”

Justin Kownacki – Why I Need You to be a Better Audience

Mack Collier – The ROI of Giving a Damn

Christopher S. Penn – Three Nearly Guaranteed Moneymaking Twitter Words

DJ Waldow – Silent Bob & Southwest Airlines: 7 Lessons Learned

The past couple days the techiverse has been entertained and/or irritated at Google Buzz, Google’s stab at social networking.  This isn’t another post about Google Buzz, but rather the hidden gem of Social Circle and Social Search. Combined with their acquisition of Aardvark, Google is amassing utilities to enable social search to take social media to the next level.

What are social search and social circles anyway?

What makes up our Social Circle for Google’s purposes:

• People in your Gmail (or Google Talk) chat list
• People in your Friends, Family, and Coworkers groups in your Google contacts
• People you’re publicly connected to through social services that you’ve listed in your Google profile, such as Twitter and FriendFeed
• People who are contacts of those in your immediate social circle

Click here to see your own social circle as made up by these connections. The social circle page also shows Secondary Connections.  These are people we’re connected to through our direct connections.

Social Search is based on the idea that we find content from our friends, family, co-workers and other connections to be the most relevant and useful vs. content is spread by people that are unknowns.  Google Buzz has forced us to put up gates to make hearing anything worthwhile possible. Buzz has also made our Google Profiles even more important because we’re linking that stuff we want to give juice to, the keywords we use to link those sites are also mapped by Google into search results and may possibly help boost the ranking and reputation of those sites.

How Social Search is drowning out the noise

Google Buzz isn’t going to kill Twitter/Friendfeed/Foursquare/Facebook, the new way of social will.  With Buzz, we’ve been quick to unfollow people, a new way of managing our social circle to get the information we need/want.

Earlier today, Christopher Penn shared his opinion that Google created Buzz as a way to aggregate the best data from content being shared around the web.  A quote from his blog:

Buzz also incentivizes us in a couple of ways. It tells us to prune back our own spewage lest our friends, the ones we care about truly, unfollow us and eliminate us. It tells us that redundancy of information is of no value to anyone using Buzz, since you can get blog posts and status updates already from FriendFaceTwitterFeedBookSquareWallReader service (now with more blatant self-promotion from social media experts!). So we share and discuss only the stuff that’s either super high quality that we just can’t afford to miss, even if it’s redundant, because of the quality, or we share stuff that’s not being shared elsewhere.

We’ve known for a while now that we’re drowning in information.  We’re all responsible for what we choose to let through the filters. Clay Shirky got it right, “It’s Not Information Overload. It’s Filter Failure.”  Google is gently showing us the error of our friending everyone ways with Google Buzz.

What Social Search means for business

How do we find new things or new products?  What influences our purchases or the things we share on the web?  With Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIN; our networks have become our places to tap for questions and information.  Google is moving with that social influence and putting the social into search.  By mapping our social connections and networks on the web, searches now provide us with a) more personalized search results (see below) and b) content that our social circle finds interesting and important to share.

Businesses who get the attention of our connections have a better chance of getting our business based on our connection’s experience.  We’ve learned that social provides a different sphere of influence than traditional advertising. We’re still learning how it works within our connections.  Marketing has shifted to tap into these social connections and to figure out how best to get our attention when we’re quickly closing the ranks to drown out the noise.

Customers are trusting their networks more every day to help them make decisions.  Customers are also quickly finding that there are companies willing to reach out, to listen and to give them what they want in a service.  If someone’s not satisfied with your product or service, chances are they’ll tap into their network to find a solution.

Social Search and SEO

With social circles within Google giving weight to search result rankings (with personalized results), reputation and relationship based SEO are starting to change the game.  We already know that Google is indexing based on connections and Google profiles (again, personalized search results).  One way of defining relationships within links that we share with others is to use XFN.

XFN outlines the relationships between individuals by defining a small set of values that describe personal relationships. In HTML and XHTML documents, these are given as values for the rel attribute on a hyperlink. XFN allows authors to indicate which of the weblogs they read belong to friends, whom they’ve physically met, and other personal relationships. Using XFN values, which can be listed in any order, people can humanize their blogrolls and links pages, both of which have become a common feature of weblogs.

As social begins to affect rankings, companies will have to think more about how we’re all interconnected online in order to reach us.  While humans are predictable and connections will give companies more information about us, they’ll have to use that information in a valuable way rather than relying on being on top of the page of Google.

The era of just good enough is quickly coming to a close and the era of being awesome is ramping up fast.  Question is where is your company on the scale?

One of the things we talk about in the social media space is sharing great things that others are up to versus talking about our own stuff all the time.

I strive to share some interesting things that others are doing on Twitter but I felt the need to take the time out and offer some of those things up on my blog tonight.  Very a la Becky McCray’s Brag Basket I wanted to brag on some great stuff I’m reading, listening to, watching, etc. here on my blog.

Josiah Boothby, Evan Flory-Barnes and Acknowledgement of a Celebration

A very dear friend of mine who has dabbled in social media emailed me recently about a musical performance that he had the pleasure of being ensemble in.  I’ve been following Josiah and talking with him online and offline for over 10 years now.  He’s a French Horn player and a very talented musician.  The piece he performed in is one that I’m very excited to share.  Here’s a short description of the performance:

As part of the 2009 Earshot Jazz Festival, Seattle bassist and composer Evan Flory-Barnes presents a world premiere titled “Acknowledgement of a Celebration: Inheritance, Authenticity and Healing,” a large-ensemble fusion of jazz, hip-hop, and classical music, complete with modern dancers and freestyle break-dancers. A standout in Seattle’s jazz scene, Flory-Barnes’ acoustic double bass skills, a combination of improvisation and classical training, have been featured in collaborations ranging from Brazilian pianist Jovino Santos Neto to hip-hop band Maroon Colony. Commissioned as part of a national series of works from Meet the Composer’s Commissioning Music/USA program, Acknowledgement of a Celebration is performed as a nine-movement orchestral cycle with 35 musicians and 10 dancers.

I’d love for the entire ensemble to have the opportunity to tour and visit Boston. Evan has graciously granted me permission to post a live recording for your listening pleasure here.  This piece is titled Dance of the Girl Obscured.

Matthew Ebel and Candor in Em

Continuing on music a little bit, I want to mention this beautiful classical piece that Matthew has composed for his MatthewEbel.net subscribers.  He’s given me permission to repost it here but don’t stop there.  Please check out what he’s up to with his subscriber awesomeness.  Night Train alone is worth the subscription fee and you’ll get so much more than that.

I love independent artists and the effort they put forth to make things happen.  It’s inspiring to watch these guys reach for the stars.

Do you know someone who has accomplished something worthwhile to share?  Make sure you take a moment and tell the world about them in your own way.

Photo by abiteofsanity